In many business and government environments, a document such as a Power Point presentation or a Microsoft® Word Document is printed by the document's creator and circulated throughout the office to various managers, co-workers, engineers, scientists, etc., for comments, suggestions, modifications, and the like. Each user's comments are often provided back to the document's author in the form of handwritten markings made to the face their copy of the circulated original. In many businesses, government offices, law firms, and the like, it may be desirable to preserve such user-applied markings. In order to preserve these markings, typically the individual marked copies from each respective user are scanned into electronic form and stored as entire separate files along with the original. While this may seem like a straight-forward way to preserve this kind of information, in large office environments wherein many users regularly apply comments to their respective copies, storing scanned versions of each entire document to preserve such user-applied markings necessarily creates separate copies of the original document. This consumes more electronic storage space than is needed to preserve each respective user markings. Moreover, in many office environments, users such CEO's, CFO's, and senior management, want to review a document which has already been circulated which contains the various user-applied markings from their staff.
Methods for digitizing documents containing customer markings have arisen. Instead of digitizing the document (i.e. scan it and store it as is), the scanned file is processed with the knowledge of the original as discussed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/638,400. Such methods general work well but, because image registration is not perfect, printer is not perfect, and sensor is not perfect, additional print defects may arise in the reprinted output. One such print defect, otherwise known as “edge burning”, is caused when pixels around strong edges in the digital original are mislabeled as customer markings due to imperfect image registration. The mislabeled pixels may increase the size of the customer markings and, as such, degrade the reprint quality when the customer markings are added back into the digital original for reprint. For another example, in those cases where excessive print defects are present on the hardcopy along with the consumer's markings, such differences may be mistaken as customer markings. This can result in a loss of image quality in the reprint. For yet another example, where the sensor used to digitized the documents could introduce additional defects due to, for example, high frequency noises, moiré (beating with halftone structure in the hardcopy), local and global magnification distortion. etc. This can result in a loss of image quality in the reprint if such additional defects in the digitization are mistaken as customer markings.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods which address the above-described shortcomings.